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$xhtml = array(
	'<{title}>' => 'Lost funds',
	'takedown' => '2017-11-01',
	'<{body}>' => <<<END
<img src="/img/CC_BY-SA_4.0/y.st./weblog/2019/03/24.jpg" alt="A flowering cherry tree" class="framed-centred-image" width="649" height="480"/>
<section id="religion">
	<h2>Religion</h2>
	<p>
		Something interesting happened during the sacrament blessing today.
		They suddenly said the blessing of the bread a second time!
		I commented about that being odd to the missionaries who I was sitting beside, and one of them explained that if they miss a word or otherwise mess up the blessing, they redo it.
		That ... seems rather odd.
		I mean, I get it, it&apos;s a ritual, and has to be done right.
		In theory.
		Except ...
		They explained that the two sacrament prayers come from the Book of Mormon.
		They even showed me both prayers.
		It seems the prayers need to be done exactly correctly.
		I asked how that could possibly be.
		I mean, these people believe that these prayers weren&apos;t originally in English.
		I guessed the prayer was supposedly originally in Greek or Egyptian, and they told me it was a modified form of Egyptian.
		The point being though that the only way to say the prayers exactly as they were &quot;originally&quot; was to say them in that modified version of Egyptian.
		If you say the translated version and mess up slightly, as long as the words still hold the same meaning, it&apos;s no different than saying a slightly-different translation of the original prayer.
		If the original words of the prayer matter, no translation is acceptable.
		And if a translation is acceptable, any reasonable translation is acceptable.
		The told me the original prayer has been lost, because Moroni (An angel? a dead human? Both? I need to clarify what exactly Moroni is with the missionaries later.) took the tablets up to heaven with him, away from human eyes.
		All that&apos;s left is Joseph Smith&apos;s &quot;translation&quot;.
		The &quot;original&quot; version has been &quot;lost&quot;.
		Because it has been lost, the closest they can come is to use the translated version.
		But again, this makes no sense because the translated version is no closer than itself with a word out of place slightly in a way that has the same meaning.
	</p>
	<p>
		Speaking of the sacrament prayer, confirmed that it&apos;s Jesus that blesses the sacrament, not Elohim.
		I also asked the missionaries about why they pray asking Elohim to bless the sacrament when it&apos;s Jesus actually performing the blessing.
		They didn&apos;t really have a good reason for that, either.
		They say it&apos;s because Jesus, when alive on earth, prayed to Elohim to bless the sacrament.
		If he prays at all though, who else is he going to pray to?
		Praying to yourself doesn&apos;t make much sense.
		I&apos;m not sure if Elohim took on an active role while Jesus was busy being human, but if he didn&apos;t, praying to him doesn&apos;t make sense anyway.
		Praying while Jesus was preoccupied would either have no effect or would involve Jesus using supernatural powers at long-range to listen into prayers.
		If Jesus is the one blessing the sacrament, it makes much more sense to pray to him instead of Elohim.
		And if Jesus was the one blessing it when he was in the flesh, it wouldn&apos;t make sense for him to pray at that time at all.
	</p>
	<p>
		During the services, there was a couple up at the head of the chapel the whole time.
		Their garb was ornate and caught my eye.
		It looked very nice.
		The man&apos;s apparel particularly drew my attention, as it seemed a very ethnic, though I wasn&apos;t sure where it was from.
		As the services continued, each of them ended up speaking to the congregation.
		It turns out they were married, and the man was actually African, explaining the cool pattern of his fabric.
		His accent was cool to listen to as well, though it made it hard to understand parts of his speech.
	</p>
	<p>
		We had another splitting up of the men and women today.
		I&apos;m getting the picture that we&apos;ve actually been doing that every other week, but that I didn&apos;t notice at first.
		I was overwhelmed by the new experience and didn&apos;t notice that there were no longer any women in the room after the break.
		Nearly everyone leaves, then some people come back.
		I guess it&apos;s the men that come back, as the men hold their meeting in the chapel.
		The women have to meet in another room.
		It seems to me like both groups should meet in other rooms, just for equality, given how many rooms not even in use at that time.
		They&apos;ve got another room to spare.
		I guess another reason I didn&apos;t notice at first is because it&apos;s such a bizarre thing to do that I wouldn&apos;t&apos;ve even thought to watch for it.
	</p>
	<p>
		So again, I went to see what the children were doing.
		I&apos;m curious to know just how much indoctrination goes on and what forms it takes.
		I guess this week was review, so the level of indoctrination was milder than last week.
		They sang the full song that they sang only the middle verse of last time.
		They decided to play a game with the song again, too, to distract from the fact that they were etching the words of the song onto the children&apos;s brains.
		This time, they hid a metronome, and made one of the missionaries (who had followed me to the child indoctrination lessons) try to find it while they tried to sing loud enough to block out the sound of it.
		Then they repeated the process and had the other missionary look for it, and finally, had one of the teachers look for it.
		Next, they reviewed another song; one that instructs them that children should be pure, meek, and mild.
		It sounds like a way to make children easier to control.
	</p>
	<p>
		After the main indoctrination meeting, the children split up and went to separate classes.
		This time, I followed them and entered the classroom at the nearest end of the hall the classrooms are connected to.
		It seemed to be the youngest children in this room, so maybe the classrooms are arranged in the hall from youngest to oldest.
		Anyway, there were two teachers and three children there.
		One of the teachers performed the main lesson, while the other acted as a helper when needed.
		The main thing that caught my attention was that when explaining to the children what parables are, they were described as being &quot;like riddles&quot;.
		Yes!
		Jesus spoke in riddles, which as far as I can tell, only made it harder to grasp his meaning and helped to facilitate the splintering of the Christian faith.
		Each denomination has their own beliefs as to what each parable means.
	</p>
	<p>
		After explaining what parables are, they told the children a couple.
		First was one about treasure hidden in a field.
		The treasure was heaven, and you were supposed to sell off everything you had to buy the field you knew the treasure was in so you could dig up and keep the treasure without stealing it.
		The treasure would be worth more than all that you&apos;d had before you sold it all, and I guess you&apos;d have the field now too.
		They held out a bag and let one child peek into it at a time.
		I though there would be some trick to it.
		They way the bag was folded, it looked like two bags, and at first, I thought they possibly had a third and were showing each child a different thing.
		I thought they were then going to have the children each say what they saw and have it not match, and it was going to represent something along the lines of how Jesus seems to take different forms in different people&apos;s lives.
		But no, that&apos;s an atheistic perspective in retrospect.
		The church is going to be more of the opinion that these are different aspects of the same entity, not disconnected entities that everyone seems to claim to be the same.
		Rather, it was a bag of necklaces and they were supposed to be &quot;treasure&quot;.
		It related to the parable.
	</p>
	<p>
		The next was a parable about growing one&apos;s faith, comparing faith to seeds that were thrown down on various types of ground.
		After telling the story, they wanted the children to act it out.
		Again, this would be to drill the story into them further.
		One of the children said &quot;I&apos;ll be the lion.&quot;.
		&quot;There&apos;s no lion in this story.&quot;, the teacher replied.
		The only animals in the parable were the human farmer and some birds that ate some of the seeds.
		They ended the lesson by planting beans in cups; beans obviously being a type of seed, just like nuts.
		So they planted the beans and took them home in the cups.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="drudgery">
	<h2>Drudgery</h2>
	<p>
		My discussion post for the day:
	</p>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			With updates, their implications depend on who&apos;s sending you the updates.
			Some companies add back doors in updates, greatly reducing the level of security of the product.
			You probably shouldn&apos;t use software made by those companies though.
			I can&apos;t offhand remember which companies I&apos;ve heard do this, but it&apos;s pretty bad.
			And some companies push updates that break things intentionally.
			Apple does this after your mobile device is a couple years old, for example, to make the thing slow and clunky so you go buy a new one, even though the hardware is actually just fine still.
			It&apos;s only the deliberately-gimped software that&apos;s now broken.
			If you&apos;ve got a software provide that can be trusted though, I agree that installing updates can go a long way in keeping your system secure.
			You mention $a[CMS]es; the main one we looked at this term, Joomla!, is run by people we can probably trust.
			And even if we can&apos;t trust them, the source code&apos;s freely available for audit.
			If they add anything nasty in an update, someone will spot it and make a fuss about it so the rest of us learn of the issue.
			I&apos;d say installing updates to Joomla! in a timely fashion is a good idea.
		</p>
		<p>
			I agree that two-factor authentication is a great step in securing accounts.
			However, many platforms aren&apos;t very flexible in how they implement it.
			For example, let&apos;s look at how Joomla! handles it.
			Like you said, two-factor authentication can be done over multiple channels; the two you mentioned were $a[SMS] and email.
			However, Joomla! <strong>*only*</strong> offers the $a[SMS] option.
			If you don&apos;t have a mobile, your Joomla! instance doesn&apos;t have access to the telephone network, or you just plain don&apos;t want the administrator of the Joomla! instance you use to have your telephone number for privacy or other reasons, you&apos;re out of Luck.
			Joomla! offers no options for people unable or unwanting to use $a[SMS].
			And that&apos;s pretty terrible.
			Email-based two-factor authentication is great, and I greatly appreciate the companies that provide it.
			Discover and Twitter, for example, both provide two-factor verification via email as an option.
		</p>
		<p>
			I highly agree that backups should be performed regularly.
			Even in the old days, I used to back up my data, but one time, when I&apos;d wiped the main copy of my data and was depending on my backup to restore from, the hard drive with my backup died on me.
			I lost everything.
			If I&apos;d kept a second copy of my data, I&apos;d&apos;ve been fine, but I deleted one of my two copies without first making a third copy so I&apos;d have two copies throughout the entire process.
			I lost all the code I&apos;d written for years, as well as my encrypted password database, meaning I lost access to all my accounts everywhere.
			I ended up losing my domain names because I couldn&apos;t access my domain accounts, and even had to start fresh as far as contact accounts, such as my email inbox.
			I lost my entire online identity.
			It really sucked.
			Backups are important.
		</p>
		<p>
			Like you said, encryption is important for security as well.
			I&apos;d go so far as to call it vital.
			Even for the most mundane tasks, I&apos;d recommend all transmissions be encrypted to prevent eavesdropping.
			For stored data, anything personal or otherwise sensitive should be encrypted on disk, as well.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
</section>
<section id="vital">
	<h2>Vital life energy</h2>
	<p>
		My vial life energy seems to have returned to me.
		At work, anyway.
		I&apos;m still completely lethargic when I sit down to work on coursework.
		I think I&apos;m feeling better at work because I&apos;ve made the plan to be more talkative about the censorship.
		I can&apos;t break the censorship, but I&apos;m trying to spread awareness of it more, though in a subtle way.
		Honestly, I think most students won&apos;t even see the message.
		However, maybe a few will.
		I know when I was feeling good about the school, I was really interested in what other students said in their essays.
		So maybe one or two students will be interested in my future essays that they grade, and will click the links to see what&apos;s up.
		I still would rather work anywhere in the store but the drive-through, but I&apos;m handling working in the drive-through much better now.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="crash">
	<h2>A Windows crash caused me to lose \$6.84 $a[USD]</h2>
	<p>
		I tried to spend money from my bottle deposit card, but the kiosk that withdraws the credit and prints vouchers to take to the checkout counter crashed on me.
		It withdrew the funds, then failed to print out the voucher.
		I lost \$6.84 $a[USD] to the void.
		I guess that&apos;s not much, but I&apos;m poor, and every penny counts.
	</p>
	<p>
		At first, the machine just locked up.
		Then a lovely Windows application not responding dialogue window popped up.
		And finally, the whole system went down, and had to reboot.
		The program probably locked up due to Windows already being in the process of failing.
	</p>
	<p>
		I talked to the customer service representative, who&apos;s watched the later stages of the meltdown with me, and there was nothing they could do.
		They insisted that after the system was back up, I check my account to see if the funds were still there.
		They claimed they shouldn&apos;t&apos;ve been withdrawn yet.
		I&apos;d seen the balance drop before the meltdown though, so I knew the funds were gone.
		I showed them to humour them though.
		They tried to tell me I need to telephone the bottle redemption centre from home tomorrow, though their story doesn&apos;t actually make sense.
		I said I could drop by the bottle redemption centre later to talk to them in person, but they said that when I got them to release the funds, it&apos;d cause the voucher to finally get printed, so if I talked to them in person, the voucher would get spat out at some random customer and I&apos;d lose the funds.
		The same exact issue would apply to telephoning them from home though.
		I don&apos;t get it.
		Anyway, they said I could come back when the redemption centre is open and they&apos;d call on my behalf, but I&apos;m not in that area at that time of day.
		I drop by after work sometimes, which means I&apos;m there in the 22:00 to 23:00 range.
	</p>
	<p>
		I guess I&apos;ll drop by the redemption centre on Tuesday and see if they can tell me what&apos;s up.
		Hopefully, I can void the fund transfer from there.
		Otherwise, I&apos;m stuck dropping by the store at a very inconvenient time.
		Oh, and by the way, that store requires vouchers be redeemed same-day.
		They claimed that because the voucher didn&apos;t print, I&apos;d be able to redeem it the day it does get printed, but that still means having to shop right away and not save it for a trip home from work.
		I can&apos;t stop by on the way to work either, as I&apos;d then need to bring my groceries to work with me.
		This setup would require me to make an extra trip for no good reason.
	</p>
</section>
END
);
